For a year, AI’s hunger for memory chips was a price story: your next laptop or phone would cost more. This week it became a product story.
Nothing has scrapped its planned CMF Phone 3 Pro, with a co-founder saying the company could not build a budget phone that felt like “a genuine step forward” while memory prices are this high. It is a new kind of casualty. Not a device that costs more, but a device that will not exist.
Even Apple is flinching
If anyone can buy its way around a shortage, it is Apple, the largest and most aggressive memory buyer on the planet. Yet chief executive Tim Cook has called the situation “unsustainable”, and the company is now expected to raise prices, with one analyst calling hikes “fairly imminent”.
Apple has already killed its cheapest Mac mini over the same pressure. When the best-insulated buyer in tech starts flinching, everyone below it is in trouble.
